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Creating a system in which half the human population gets most of their food from human remains might be a highly efficient way to end our species. Similar prion diseases exist in humans and are documented to have been transmitted through cannibalism. They've been shown to remain effective even after being heated to 600 C. In order to fully denature prions they have to be heated to temperatures of 1,000 degrees Celsius or more. Prions don't respond to temperatures at which meat is normally cooked. The disease is caused by prions, which cause proteins in the brain to fold irregularly. Mad Cow Disease occasionally prompts recalls of tainted meat. Of course, properly cooking and preparing our Soylent could eliminate a significant number of those diseases, but not all of them. Every disease a person has necessarily infects humans, so the risk of disease transmission from contaminated meat would be immense. Moreover, there are comparatively few diseases which jump species from animals to humans.
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If we were eating people, especially ordinary people, there's little guarantee those same precautions would be present. Even still, factory forms still present a significant disease risk. Livestock animals are given antibiotics throughout their lives and the presence of disease is usually cause for that individual animal to be discarded. Animal meat produced at factory farms undergoes all sorts of precautions in order to prevent the transmission of disease to the people consuming it. Unfortunately - or fortunately, depending on if you're being eaten or doing the eating - things aren't equal. Certainly, other animals have done it throughout our history. All things being equal, eating human meat is a perfectly efficient way of calorie exchange. You could get protein and fat, albeit at different distributions than other animals. Human bodies are made of the same sorts of things as other animals. Finally, the meat is ground into a powder and sifted to remove any chunks which were missed.Īt this point, your Soylent people are unrecognizable and ready to be baked into crackers or used for soup bases. The aim is to remove as much moisture as possible. After dressing, they go through a dehydration process either using a dehydrator or cooking over a low temperature for an extended period. Though, in a pinch that may not be strictly necessary.
SOYLENT GREEN SKIN
Typically, the skin and bones of your chosen animal are removed. Meat powders are fairly simple to produce. And if we want to make a human biscuit, that's probably the way to go. Where's the beef? It's in the powder, of course. Yet, when you look inside, all you'll find is powder. If you've ever looked at a seasoning packet you've probably noticed they list chicken, beef, pork, or other meats as ingredients. But we suspect that if we're going to eat people, we'll want at least the illusion that we're eating something else. Establish a butchering process, package the cut meat, put it on the shelf. The easiest way to do it, but the least palatable - particularly if you're trying to hide what you're doing, as was the case in the film - would be to treat humans the way we treat livestock. After all, humans are just meat, no different from any other animal at the end of the day. Supposing, of course, we decided we wanted to transform our lost loved ones into food, we could definitely do it. The question now is, could we really make Soylent? And would we want to? Now that we're actually in 2022, the world has seen an increase in novelty foods, including one supposed meal replacement shake named after the famed movie. The film was a stark commentary about the dangers of destroying our environment and the lengths to which some corporations could go to maintain profit. The company bills their new green variety as more nutritious, having been manufactured from oceanic plankton, but by the end we know the truth. It comes in various colors, the best of which is the titular Soylent Green. With not enough to eat, half of the world's population is sustained only by a staple food source created and sold by the Soylent Corporation. Resource and housing shortages have exacerbated class stratification, with the wealthy living in lush, reinforced houses while the rest of the population is scrounging for scraps just to survive. Released in 1973, Soylent Green imagines a dystopian nightmare version of 2022 in which overpopulation and climate disaster have made the Earth nearly unlivable.
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